1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates a device and method for automatically generating an ontology instance, and more particularly, to a device and method for automatically generating an ontology instance that extracts entities and inter-entity relationships from structured documents and unstructured documents on the Internet and generates/stores ontology instances.
This work was supported by the IT R&D program of MIC/IITA [2006-S-036-02, Development of large vocabulary/interactive distributed/embedded VUI for new growth engine industries].
2. Description of the Related Art
A knowledge representing technology, which more naturally represents actual knowledge and can automatically induce new knowledge through logical inference, has been actively researched in recent years, after a data-based technology that represents and uses data on the basis of a relational model. A typical technology development trend is a Semantic Web technology.
Semantic Web is the next generation intelligent Web in which a computer can understand the meanings of knowledge resources and logically infer the meanings. The Semantic Web is a framework and technology that represents information about resources (web documents, various files, services, and the like) and relationship-meanings information (Semantics) between resources in distributed computing environment such as the present Internet by a machine (computer) processable form and allows an automated machine (computer) to process the information. Resources, information, knowledge, and the like are defined as a concept of an ontology under the framework. Accordingly, the ontology is knowledge that is obtained by formally and clearly specifying various information resources on the Internet so as to be processed by a computer.
However, since various information provided from the Internet is not standardized in a predetermined format, it is difficult to collect various information, to represent various information in the form of an ontology, and to convert various information into ontology instances.
A Large-scale Ontology Generation System, which integrates independent knowledge distributed on the Internet and generates consistent knowledge information, has been disclosed in Korean Patent application Publication No. 2005-0065196. The system collects knowledge that exists on knowledge servers distributed on Internet, and generates relationship information of the knowledge, thereby generating consistent and integrated knowledge information.
However, since the system operates under a premise that knowledge exists on knowledge servers, there is a problem in that the system is difficult to be applied to knowledge information not having a format. Therefore, it is not possible to collect and integrate knowledge information generated by a system that is not designed on the basis of an ontology. For this reason, there is a limitation on the collection of knowledge information.